SanDisk has continued with plans to replace the CD with the SD, by launching a portable music player based around its pre-loaded Micro SD card notion.
The Sansa SlotMusic Player is designed to take the storage firm’s SlotMusic cards, unveiled last month. Fortunately, it also accepts so-called “self-loaded” Micro SD cards crammed …

wtf?

Bunch of arse.

Will this be in the bargain bins before or after Christmas? This is only any use for kids or promotional tat. An utterly crap idea; does anyone want to carry media disks or cards around with them again?

Now do the HD movie version..

Smaller?

I could see this could work if the damn thing wasn't so big; look at the size of it compared to the SD card that goes in it!

If you could make it about the same size (or smaller) as an Apple Shuffle then you have an mp3 player with a capacity limited only be the number of media cards you want to lug around. If it can handle high capacity media cards then you'd only need perhaps a couple and you'd have a fairly flexible little player.

Cards are OK... but...

I've got an MP3 player with a card slot, but for a particular reason:

My music player is not just a music player!

Language courses, OU CDs, news podcasts etc etc etc all find their way into the little box. The seperation of music and non-music means I don't have the annoying music-followed-by-random-lesson-in-German thing happening when I'm on the train. However, I see no similar need for the separation of music from music, so I see no need for preloaded cards.

Why?

Words almost fail me. How can a group of what must be fairly bright people come up with an idea like this and possibly think it might be succesful in a post-iPod world?

How could they possibly imagine people might be convinced to pay £16 for something they can either download for free or get from iTunes for £7? Have they learnt nothing from the last 10 years of music biz decline?

They might as well go out to the car park of their factory and burn several million dollars and save a lot of people a lot of effort. Madness!

SD card storage?

It should be easy enough to put a small form factor storage compartment on the actual device for your spare cards (that's if Sandisk actually think about it).

~50hr battery life, with an easy to replace cell, and I'd be interested.

Small form factor, simple display, good battery life. If you don't like lots of separate cards (which I do - don't ask) shove a single biggun' in. Include a smallish amount of internal and you could allow 'hot swapping' of files between mates. For legit stuff only though, obviously. That's assuming they want to do a custom design just for me!

"$15 (£16/€20)"

I know it's been corrected in the article, but please folks, what's in the brackets is clearly el'reg's doing and not a genuine price. Go by the $, as they clearly state UK prices aren't recorded (whatever that means).

The 90's called...

@Kev K

That... already exists. Has for years. Even apple's already made one of those: the early ipod shuffle models were literally just that.. a big USB stick with a controls button, a plug for earphones at the top, and a usb plug at the bottom.

@ Kev K

This thing wouldn't be so bad if it had a screen and inbuilt high capacity flash storage drive, which would give the option to download the album card to internal storage when plugged into to the player or just to play the music.

Size

Not that I would mind an SD card, but the micro is too small for practical use. If the music were completely un-compressed and the card would last as long as a cd, then I would have no problem switching. My problem stems from dealing with my mom and other 'older' relatives trying to keep up with all this small stuff. They can barely read the small print now.

Seriously, I have to buy hardware based on how simple a remote is (Very few good all-in-one remotes with nice big buttons and easy to explain setup) for them. It's not stupidity on their part, just old age and bad eyes. For some reason, my mom thinks pressing "TV" should turn on the tv, not "Component" (I'm already being punished with the change-over from analog to digital signals). CD's are about as small as my mom is getting and my grandfather only uses the cd's that I get him (still loves his albums with all the snap, crackle and pop).

I really hope this small format fails and a more reasonably sized one pops up. Eventually, my eyes are going to go bad and I don't think my younger relatives (being raised in their short attention span culture) are going to want to spend the time to explain what's on each little card that I own and help me find some small slot on a console.

So explain to me why this is better than my phone and Bluetooth headphones?

Kind of a weird product, as if some senior manager in marketing's got a bee in his (her) bonnet about something.

I definitely won't be buying one. I've got an older Sandisk music player that uses a USB stick (fine except it only uses their stick) and its been mostly superceeded by my cellphone -- plays music and makes phone calls.